Vygotsky’s Socio-cultural Model of the Mind
蘇文伶
Jan. 8, 2010
1. the Marxist framework:
In the beginning of his career, Vygotsky concurred with Pavlov that conditional reflexes serve as a major link between nature and culture.
“… the decisive factor in the establishment and formation of conditional reflexes turns out to be the environment as a system of stimuli that act upon the organism… In this sense the mechanism of the conditional reflex is a bridge thrown from the biological laws of the formation of hereditary adoptions established by
On top of conditional reflexes, which human beings and animals share, Vygotsky added higher mental functions (i.e., the system of signs), which he argued human beings also possess.
“Human behavior is distinguished exactly in that it creates artificial signaling stimuli, primarily the grandiose signalization of speech, and in this way masters the signaling activity of the cerebral hemispheres. If the basic and most general activity of the cerebral hemispheres in animals and man is signalization, then the basic and most general activity of man that differentiates man from animals in the first pace, from the aspect of psychology, is signification, that is, the creation and use of signs.
(Vygotsky, 1931/1997, 55; qtd. In Van der Veer 28).
On the point of animal-human being distinction, René van deer Veer suggests that Vygotsky might have been influenced by a biology professor at Moscow University called Aleksey N. Severtsov (1866-1936 ) who once noted that “From a very early stage of his evolution, man beings begins to replace new organs by new tools. Where the animal, to adapt to new life conditions, elaborates new structural capacities… man invents… new tools…man creates for himself so to speak an artificial environment- the environment of culture and civilization.” (Severtsov, 1922, 52-54; qtd. In Van der Veer 47).
The view that humans create sign systems as tools to interact with the environment, rather than passively adapt to it like animals, is echoed in the quote from Marx in the beginning of “Consciousness as a Problem in the Psychology of Behavior”:
“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of its cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” At the end of every labor process we get a result that already existed in an ideal form, that is, in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the materials which he works but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will” (K. Marx, Dan Kaptial, Vol. I, Part 3, 193; qtd, in Vygotsky, 1925, 63).
The materials (i.e. sign systems) available to the human subject and the use which the tools are put to are subject to historical contingencies. Vygotsky;s theory of human evolution is compatible with the historical materialism of Marxism.
2. inner speech as a breeding ground of imagination
History, rather than biology, plays a prominent role in Vygotsky theory of human development, especially in the formation of the mind (Packer 11).
Vygotsky’s schema for the mental operations involved in the use of signs:
(1) primitive or natural language (pre-intellectual speech and preverbal thought such as a child’s babbling, crying, or the first words that have nothing to do with thinking. )
(2) external speech (signs used as tools)
(3) egocentric speech (a transitional stage in the evolution from vocal to inner speech )
(4) inner speech (the adult…”thinking for himself”
What is “consciousness”??
“Man differs from the animal by his consciousness” (Vygotsky, “The problem of Consciousness, 1934/1997,
“We use consciousness to denote awareness of the activity of the mind- the consciousness of being conscious, A preschool child who, in response to the question, “Do you know your name?” tells his name lacks this self-reflective awareness: He knows his name but is not conscious of knowing it” (Vygotksy, Thought and Language 91 ).
“Although Vygotsky at one point called consciousness the reflex of reflexes, he transcended this understanding by using the phrase experience of experiences, later defining consciousness as co-knowledge… Consciousness is not an a priori that is given and it is not generative by nature, but originates in society” (Robbins 23; also see “Consciousness as Problem, 1925/1997,
“Consciousness as a whole has a semantic structure. We judge consciousness by the semantic structure, for sense, the structure of consciousness, is the relation to the external world” (Vygotsky, “The Problem of Consciousness,” 1934/1997, 137).
Another schema: “collective (social) activity-culture-signs-individual activity-individual consciousness” (Robbins 22).
Caryl Emerson on the affinity between Bakhtin and Vygotsky
“Vygotsky’s final work, thought and language (1934), supplemented by his essays of the 1930s, can be read as an important predecessor and perhaps even as clinical underpinning to Bakhtin’s philosophy of language. (Emerson 251)
“For Bakhtin, words come not out of dictionaries but out of concrete dialogic situations… Words in discourse always recall earlier contexts of usage, otherwise they could not mean at all. It follows that every utterance, covertly or overtly is an act of indirect discourse.” (Emerson 249).
“Vygotsky concluded that egocentric speech was not, as Piaget had suggested, a compromise between primary autism and reluctant socialization but rather the direct outgrowth (or, better, ingrowth) of speech which had been from the start socially and environmentally oriented.” (Emerson 253)
“For Vygotsky, the Word is a powerful amalgam: part sign, part tool, it is the significant humanizing event. One makes a self through the words one has learned, fashions one’s own voice and inner speech by a selective appropriation of the voices of others.”
3. Reflections
A. A rationalist model of the mind: highlighting the rhetorical aspect of language. For Vygotsky, thinking almost always has illocutionary function. No place for Freudian unconscious?
“We agree to view the mind as a compound complex process which is not at all covered by its conscious part, and therefore it seems to us that in psychology it is entirely legitimate to speak about the psychologically conscious or the psychologically unconscious: the unconscious is the potentially conscious” (Vygotsky, “Mind, Consciousness, the Unconscious,” 1930/1997,119).
“Several of Freud’s critics who are inclined to equate the unconscious with the unsocial and unsocial with the nonverbal also pointed to the intimate link between verbalization and the conscious awareness of processes, Watson, too, sees in verbalization the main distinguishing characteristic of the conscious. He openly states that everything which Freud called unconscious is actually nonverbal” (Vygotsky, “Mind, Consciousness, the Unconscious,” 1930/1997, 120-121).
B. Inner speech/ literary study: adequate as a tool for (social) reform?
C. External/Internal speech: implication for Second Language Acquistion(SLA)
Egocentric language = interlanguage?
Interlanguage: “the systematic knowledge of language which is independent of both the learner’s L1 and the L2 system he is trying to learn. Interlanguage was the theoretical construct which underlay the attempts of SLA researchers to identify thee stages of developemt through which L2 learners pass on their way to L2 (or near- L2) proficiency” (Ellis 42).
Vygotsky vs. N. Chomsky: hard to account for a relatively fixed order of process.
